It’s showtime. For Ontario’s three major party leaders, debate night arrives on June 3rd in a blaze of media interest and a rare dose of direct attention from voters. It also brings the leaders’ last best chance to steal the election. Or to blow it. Tuesday’s debate will mark the only 90 minutes during this entire 41 day marathon during which Kathleen Wynne, Tim Hudak and Andrea Horwath will stand together so that they can better illustrate what sets them apart. As campaign events go, it is the Big Gulp – an oversized, saturated risk to leaders’ health that is undeniably addictive.

Not so long ago, the ferocity of media interest would have been answered with a relative dose of calm from veteran campaigners. Pundits would explain patiently that, with only a few exceptions, debates rarely re-write an election’s outcome. Instead, these contests tend to reinforce the biases that voters already harbour. In other words, if you liked Kathleen Wynne before the debate, you’ll probably come away feeling she won the debate. And vice versa. That analysis holds a little less firmly these days. Soaring rates of cynicism and voter disengagement are combining to alter long-held assumptions about electioneering. Public attention to politics is now so superficial that debates have emerged as mid-campaign super-events. They frequently constitute the first, and sometimes the final, occasion that voters will bother to take stock of the leaders and consider their vote. Consequently, the stakes are sky-high. And next Tuesday, two additional factors make them higher still. First, this debate comes atypically late in the campaign. With Wednesday lost to post-debate analysis and voting day too late to matter, there will be only seven true campaign days left for winners to press their case or losers to engineer a comeback. White knuckle time.

Second, the polls are a contradictory mess. Varying technologies and methodologies lead some to project a majority for Hudak, others for Wynne. In talking to the various campaigns, internal polls seem equally scrambled. This leads to the peculiar problem that heading into the debate, both the Liberals and Tories believe they’re winning. Only one of them can be right. Chances are, the one who’s wrong adopts a debate strategy that backfires.

Here’s what to watch for from each leader.

• Kathleen Wynne’s team believe they have two things going for them. First, voters prefer the premier to keep being the premier. They like her more. And they believe she’s better up to the job than the other two applicants. Second, they believe any clash with Hudak about jobs should work to their benefit. The mangled math of his million jobs pledge combined with the threatening certainty of 100,000 pink slips, makes “jobs, not cuts” the premier’s preferred battleground. Wynne’s most obvious challenge will be to slip punches about gasplants and scandal while avoiding the appearance of shirking responsibility. But it is her own performance where she must really focus. Wynne, for all her talk of positive politics, has a tendency toward inelegant partisanship when challenged. She must avoid this impulse and learn to defend without being defensive, returning whenever possible to a discussion about how committed she is to creating good jobs and growth. The Liberal campaign more than any other would welcome a debate that doesn’t leave a single lasting memory on election-day. As the incumbent, she wins a draw.

• Tim Hudak must find a way to present himself as the jobs premier while somehow avoiding a 90-minute debate over his plan to take away the jobs of 100,000 workers. The smart play would be to scrap his ‘bold’ talk altogether during this debate and present himself instead as a safe alternative for those seeking change. That means muting his talk of smaller class sizes and fired schoolteachers — dialling down his emphasis on fiscal sacrifice and dialling up the focus on economic opportunity. It also means he has to hope that Andrea Horwath will agree to play the part of attack dog against Wynne. If Hudak spends his time screaming about Liberal corruption he risks reinforcing his own high negatives among swing voters. A measured, inviting Hudak who lets Horwath do his dirty work is far more likely to connect with viewers. But such a strategy will require nerves of steel. What if Horwath doesn’t cooperate and Wynne gets a free pass? Hudak can’t risk the debate becoming a non-event. If the PCs own polling shows them behind, you can bet he’ll be elbows up. An understated performance means the PCs think they’re ahead.

• Andrea Horwath is in a dreadful spot. With only a few days left, she’s leading a remarkably unremarkable campaign that has been attacked from within and is leaking support. In practical terms, she has no option but to go on the attack. That was the choice she made during her Northern Ontario debate with the premier and, while it may have captured media notice, it doesn’t appear to have helped her with voters. Still, Horwath has the best chance to steal the debate. The camera adores her and when she’s at her finest (something we’ve seen rarely during this campaign) she draws people to her like ants to jam. Unfortunately for Horwath, the weakness of her campaign and the flimsiness of her message emerge as huge handicaps. She’s right on the edge of being ignored. That leaves her with little option but to attack Kathleen Wynne sharply while simultaneously trying to appeal to progressive voters. It’s probably what she’ll do. But it’s not the way to win. Risky though it might seem, she’d be far better off to treat the debate as an infomercial, ignoring her opponents entirely and wooing the watching public. We’ll see if the Steeltown Scapper has the courage to not scrap.

One final to-watch-for. Inevitably, you will hear from pundits on the night of the debate that it produced no clear winner. That’s not analysis, that’s ass-covering. There’s always a winner. It’s one who didn’t lose.

Scott Reid is a principal at Feschuk.Reid and a CTV News political analyst. He was Director of Communications for former prime minister Paul Martin. Follow him on Twitter.com/_scottreid .

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